Financial burdens of out-of-pocket spending among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries: Role of the ‘big four’ chronic health conditions

class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide

# Financial burdens of out-of-pocket spending among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries: Role of the ‘big four’ chronic health conditions
## Presenter: Rashmita Basu
### Discussant: Ian McCarthy
### ASHEcon Annual Meeting, June 22, 2021

---

<style type="text/css">
.remark-slide-content {
    font-size: 30px;
    padding: 1em 2em 1em 2em;    
}
.remark-code, .remark-inline-code { 
    font-size: 20px;
}
</style>

# Medicare Chronic Conditions Data

[CMS Link to Dashboard](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Chronic-Conditions/CCDashboard)

---
count: false

# Medicare Chronic Conditions Data

.center[
  ![:scale 70%](images/chronic-conditions.gif)
]
 
 
---
count: false

# Medicare Chronic Conditions Data

.center[
  ![](images/chronic-conditions-spending.gif)
]

---
# What we can learn from this paper

If we want to improve Medicare to better shield beneficiaries from financial implications of illness...

- Need to know areas of greatest weakness (high OOP spending)
- Need to identify types of spending
- Suggest *why* spending is high in certain areas

---
# Questions and future directions

- What is the estimand?
- Is there a "cleaner" comparison (e.g., those with newly diagnosed CVD versus those with no chronic disease)?
- Prescription drugs are biggest culprit, but what does this mean for policy?
  - Are people not buying Part D even though they "should"?